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Ian Tattersall is currently Curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Born in England and raised in East Africa, he has carried out both primatological and paleontological fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen and Mauritius. Trained in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, and in geology and vertebrate paleontology at Yale, Tattersall has concentrated his research since the 1960s in two main areas: the analysis of the human fossil record and its integration with evolutionary theory; and the study of the ecology and systematics of the lemurs of Madagascar. Tattersall is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public, with several trade books to his credit, among them The Monkey in the Mirror (2002), Extinct Humans (with Jeffrey Schwartz, 2000), Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (1998) and The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives (1995; rev. 1999) as well as numerous articles in Scientific American and the co-editorship of the definitive Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory. |
The Future of Science conference was held in Venice, Italy in September of 2006. Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, Marc Hauser, and Ian Tattersall were interviewed at this the Second World Conference. The theme was evolution and as the organizers themselves state: 